I was reading a few weeks ago that it's more about easy dopamine rather than free that is so incredibly destructive.

Scrolling for hits of satisfying novelty is a proposition that will not be sustainably met.

Part of me also wonders if things like this can be used for not so great things, can they be used for good things?

Story time! A couple years ago, I found myself with pretty severe ADHD and no way to get treatment for it. (There may have been a global healthcare cataclysm involved...)

I wanted to make some progress on a personal project, but I had a history of abandoning things, without external accountability. I had a guy for that the previous year, which worked great, but our interests diverged, so I had to find a way to do it on my own.

I realized that I couldn't force it. I had to find a way to make it work without having sufficient dopamine. Without relying on willpower at all.

So I stumbled into environmental design from first principles. I simply designed around all the failure modes.

1. I noticed that if I skipped a day of working on my project, the chance of completely losing momentum would rise enormously. So I decided I have to work every day, but to make it sustainable it only needs to be an hour.

2. I noticed that if I put work off until later in the day, the chance of skipping a day would rise enormously. So I decided that I had to start working as soon as I woke up. (But only for an hour. I could keep going but I didn't have to.)

3. And finally I noticed that, if I started playing with my phone or surfing the internet, the day was basically over. So I made a rule that I had to keep them both off for the first hour of the day. (And I turned them off the night before for good measure. That way I am waking up into the correct state by default.)

And what do you know. I didn't miss a day for 3 months. Even my dopamine starved brain was able to persist on this project every day without fail for several months straight, because I simply made these small changes to my environment!

The project suddenly became the most fun and interesting thing I could be doing. I actually looked forward to working on it the next day, when I went to sleep at night!